Will ‘Makers’ Help Chip Guys’ Bottom Line?

Are you seeing this newborn love among "makers," board vendors, and chip companies? What mystifies me is not so much the love part, but how anyone could eventually mistake this infatuation for good business.

MADISON, Wis. — Am I the only one scratching my head over this newborn love among “makers,” board vendors, and chip companies? What mystifies me most is not so much the love part, but how anyone could eventually mistake this infatuation for good business.

OK, there are a few random facts I’ve picked up in the past few months. First, chip suppliers today are going out of their way to help out non-engineering professionals in pursuit of DIY projects, or those who say they are.

To cater to this crowd, it isn’t enough just to give them traditional reference design. Freescale Semiconductor, for one, hopes to mine the crowd, despite an absence of hardware design expertise. It possesses some specific domain knowledge that might project it as the source of the next hot wearable device.

Freescale earlier this year launched a new reference design called WaRP. Freescale is adding to its platform a broad range of wearable building blocks (sensors, software, connectivity, etc.) from which makers can pick and choose what they need to scale up or scale down the device.

Marvell recently announced Kinoma Create. In pursuit of Web designers, software developers, and non-engineering professionals with no prior experience in designing a system, Marvell designed Kinoma Create, a JavaScript-powered maker kit for prototyping consumer electronics and IoT devices. Peter Hoddie, Marvell’s Kinoma vice president, described the kit as “much more complete than what a single-board computer can offer.”

It comes with "a case to make it portable, a battery to make it mobile, adjustable legs to reorient it, and an integrated breadboard for adding sensors -- no soldering iron needed," he said. But the beauty part (they say) is that users can integrate all the necessary elements with the higher-level JavaScript software.

Allwinner in China seemed delighted when pcDuino picked Allwinner’s apps processor as the brain for its motherboard. All the hard work needed to make a variety of Arduino hardware -- developed by the open-source hardware community -- pluggable to pcDuino has been carried out by the pcDuino community, not Allwinner. pcDuino, with no help from Allwinner, is enabling makers to design everything from a new smoke detector (which sends a message to your smartphone to change batteries, instead of making annoying beeping sounds in the middle of the night) to virtual desktops.

Below $100Next: Companies are putting out reference design-turned single computer boards at a price point around $100. At a time when you can get a Raspberry Pi, a credit card-sized board with a Broadcom SoC running Linux at only $35, even $100 seems pretty expensive to some makers.

A startup, Adapteva, last year launched a parallel-processing board called Parallella using a Kickstarter campaign. The company recently started building 1,400 boards a week and began “shipping mass quantities to Kickstarter backers, many of whom have waited almost 18 months.” The Parallella board is priced… well, you guessed it… at $99.

Similarly, Marvell last month launched Kinoma Create at Indiegogo, another crowd-funding site. Now the Kinoma Create, scheduled to start shipping in September, is priced at $149.

As Andreas Olofsson, Adapteva’s CEO, told us, “Apparently, nobody any longer buys a $1,500 reference design from a chip company.” As discouraging as all this sounds, the new “maker” movement opens opportunities for chip vendors to move devices and reference designs into the hands of people they’ve never sold chips to before. “If it is under $100, even a professional engineer could use his personal credit card to try out a new chip in his spare time over the weekend,” he explained. That’s not bad for Adapteva, which is hoping to sway engineers to try out the company's low-power multicore microprocessor design.

@AZskibum, no, i don't think that a chip company would rely "solely" on firmware, drivers, etc. developed by the open source community...but it would help, I imagine, the problem of having to handhold so many potential customers by fielding all the questions.

As somone said, "Friends help friends for free" is what chip companies are dreaming as the purpose of their so-called "community," is it not?

Well I'm glad that someone else feels this way. I constantly find myself trying to explain where the maker stuff fits. I do a lot of contract design for smaller companies and it's not uncommon for the CEO to proclaim that he is going to replace everything with Arduino.

Never mind that 90% of the product is custom power stuff. Typical wishful thinking I suppose.

I also run into a lot of younger less experienced folks that think the only one who makes microcontrollers is Microchip. They invented it right!

I try to explain that they might be better off using a $99 board from Freescale rather than trying to splice all sorts of Arduino stuff together. It falls on def ears. Somehow free source is not as good as open source. C is scary and sketches are not.

On the other hand, it could take days to find that $99 demo board on the Freescale website and even at that it might not be obvious that it is actually what you want. It is also not all that easy to figure out that the free versions of their development tools are hugely productive high quality tools. What a deal!!

I am sure that the same is true for many other vendors. The issue is that for me this particular one is easier than Arduino for virtually everything I do. However it has taken some time to tease that out.

If a manufacturer can gain some visibility outside of the small group that already knows them, so much the better if it's not a huge investment.

Back in the 70s, the standard success story was 'management didn't want to take risks on eating their current business, so we struck out on our own with an idea". Not a problem, since HP, DEC, and IBM ruled and the pesky startup types were just a pain in the management's butt anyway. No Prez will loose his job.

In the past few years, the opposite situation has come up. When Intel turned down Apple's request for a processor for iPhone/iPad, the storm cost people their jobs and the company a good chunk of their capitalization. Every BoD now hammers Exec staff on how hip they are to new types of customers. No chip company Prez will survive without a 'maker' story to tell the BOD. "Yes, we are building tools for the guys in dirty Hoodies who hack IoT stuff!" No one on the BoD is asking about ROI questions about the unwashed semi-masses yet.

It is easy to put a small team in place, give some love to the open source community, and issue a bunch of Press Releases. Not so it you have to go to the BoD and explain why you missed a market.

Here's another factor. In many large companies, there is Business Area One (IBM terminology), which is the largest money-making part of the company. For IBM, this used to be mainframes, for Intel it's the x86 line. Typically, the management of Business Area One calls the shots. After all, if BA1 fails, the whole company goes under.

In some companies, if you're not in BA1 you're a second-class citizen. If you're a chip-maker, the silicon guys are BA1. So software and making evaluation and development boards could easily end up having second-class status and the company will have trouble hiring and retaining good people for those jobs. In that case, outside software and eval board developers could end up producing far better products than the company itself. If a chip has exciting capabilities, people in the developer community will get excited and create wonderful software and boards, provided that the chip-maker publishes adequate documentation. "Of course, the whole point [...] is lost, if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, eh?" [Dr. Strangelove (1964)]

ASskibum wrote about: ...software that the company itself cannot support...

As long as the community-developed software uses a standard open-source license, the company can at any time fork the software and support the fork themselves. If it's a copyleft license like GPL, the company will need to release the improved source code with binaries. If it's a permissive license, they don't ever have to release source code again. (At least that's my understanding, IANAL).

The community has done the hard work of exploring what the software should do and figuring out what tricks are needed to get around the quirks of the chip, so those high-risk, high-cost (in terms of programmer time) factors are taken care of.

A great way to bring the software in house is to hire the key community developers, which gets the company immediate expertise and demonstrates that yes, programmers can make real money writing free software. Plus, if the key developers wrote all the code they can relicense the software to the company on a proprietary basis.

The maker community's collective efforts to develop firmware, drivers, etc are great, but do you honestly think a chip company would rely solely on that -- software that the company itself cannot support -- as the only means of enabling its reference design?

One interesting place to look at the effect of maker communities on real products is the mbed community: it's relatively old, uses commercial friendly licenses and is relatively easy to transfer to manufacturing. Not sure how to get the data. Maybe asking mbed or arm, the company behind the project, is a good way.